December Unemployment Dips to 8.5 Percent

The economy got a booster shot Friday: U.S. unemployment in December dipped slightly to 8.5 percent, the lowest it's been since February 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The December jobless rate for people 45 and older remained steady at 6.3 percent, the lowest it's been in three years.

Last month, private businesses added 200,000 new jobs, with many of the new positions coming in transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing, health care and mining, according to the labor bureau.

Overall, the country added 1.64 million jobs in 2011, the most in five years, according to MarketWatch. Here are some additional details:

Small Businesses are Hiring: Work force analysts had anticipated positive monthly employment figures based on earlier reports showing stronger consumer confidence, manufacturing growth and small-business productivity. A widely watched December hiring report from payroll processor ADP this week showed a gain of 325,000 private industry jobs last month. ADP's numbers don't always line up with government findings, but economists look to them as a barometer of small-business hiring.

Law Firms are Hiring: Jobs database SimplyHired said that based on its current listings, legal industry hiring is up close to 122 percent from a year ago, followed by hiring at nonprofits and auto, health-care and technology companies. The job listing service also reported the largest year-over-year regional hiring increases in Raleigh and Durham, N.C., Birmingham, Norfolk and Newport News, Va., Louisville, Ky., Sacramento and Oklahoma City.

Confidence for the New Year: As 2012 begins, people are more confident in the U.S. job market, according to a new poll. During the fourth quarter, 41 percent of employees and the self-employed said if they lost their job in the next six months they felt "likely" to find another position matching their skills and income, according to a recent Glassdoor poll conducted by Harris Interactive. Just 21 percent of unemployed job seekers said it was "unlikely" they'd find a job in six months, down from 32 percent in the third quarter of 2011 and the lowest level since the jobs listing and salary review website initiated the quarterly survey in 2008.

Cautious Optimism: Despite the progress, the economy isn't out of the woods, with analysts and other observers cautioning that lower unemployment masks a large number of people who still are either underemployed -- not working as much as they'd like -- or can't find work. "We continue to make steady progress," Jonathan Basile, a Credit Suisse economist, tells Bloomberg Businessweek. "There's still a very high level of unemployment despite the improvement that we're seeing. There's still a long way to go."

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Read more: Top Workplace Trends for 2012